[asterisk-biz] FCC ruling that requires all VoIP providers to make wiretapping capabilities available to the U.S. government

Tue Jun 13 11:54:14 MST 2006

On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 13:51 -0400, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> 	Some people are discussing whether Skype's "free calls" gets them out
> of these requirements:
> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060612/1722232.shtml .

My opinion generally is no, becuase the law doesnt say if you charge for
it, only if you provide it.  Further calls to the US are not free if you
are outside the US (or at least mexico where a friend currently is and
based on what appears to be IP verification he is told he has to pay).
So that seems to counter the 'quacks like a duck' argument since they
are indeed selling calls to the US for some people, and
skype/ebay/paypal/everything_else  state that its only until dec 31
2006, ie a promotional thing.  As such it would be a hard argument
indeed to say that becuase they are running a promo they arent really
providing phone service.

This means that trxtel "the voip provider that pays you" must also
provide CALEA support, however trxtel has a harder time since we
currently do not have any accounts.  No usernames or logins, no way to
tell one customer from another.  It is something we are reviewing to see
if we can still operate the way that we want to and comply.  Accounts
will be created when the DID beta finishes (should be within a month or
so) and we start paying people for inbound DIDs calls as well.  Accounts
must be enabled for inbound only traffic since we have to know who to
route the DID to.

We truely have an argument that we are different in that we dont charge
our customers, we pay them, but our lawyers tell us that its not worth
it even if that were a valid argument, but assure us they dont believe
it to be a valid argument.

We shall see, I am sure that they will go after the bigger people first
for any infractions, however CALEA generally doesnt allow them to
inspect your switch to ensure complaince, its only when they get a
warrant and you tell them you cant tap because you have no facilities to
do that that you get into trouble.  

Tapping isnt that hard depending on what you want to do, ranch networks
makes an asterisk plugin that works with their stuff (basically port
replication that sends the RTP stream to two points, the sniffer box and
the real destination.  On smaller setups you can use the monitor command
(however that will cripple busy servers).  

Some people have set up asterisk boxes where 1 is the 'tap box' and it
records any call that gets sent to it, then by adjusting their sip
proxies on a per customer basis they can tap everything from that
customer without too much trouble.  Inbound can be a bit trickier since
you may have pris scattered over a few machines and they all need to be
able to record without dropping packets all over the floor where they
make a mess.

-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
Belfast IE +44 28 9099 6461    DE +49 801 777 555 3402
Utrecht NL +31 306 553058      US WA +1 360 207 0479
US NY +1 516 687 5200          FreeWorldDialup: 635378
http://www.trxtel.com the VoIP provider that pays you!
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